I think that ZA/ZG was the best 5 man dungeons made, however there was only 2 dungeons so would not call it the best era.

The best era was probably either release state WotLK or release state Cata HCs. WotLK had a much better meta achievement, more genuine dungeons, better lore and better grouping system in the dungeons though cata dungeons had better designed boss fights.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

Vanilla with Strat and Scholo at level were amazing and ZF at level was insanely fun - stair fight FTW. BC 5 mans were a ton of fun but that's colored by the fact that I had a regular group of friends who included a kick ass pally tank. But Botanica, Arc, Mech were fun as was heroic Shattered Halls. The Auchindon instances... eh. Shadow Lab was fun, but too much trash.

LK heroics were lame and super easy. Some of the design was great, but it was 'pull, tank gets aggro, AOE, pull, tank gets aggo...'. Especially as a rogue, LK was the begining of the end of truly great 5 mans because it became about damage and nothing else. In some of the Vanilla and BC 5 mans you could shine by CCing (sap, Vanish/Cheap Shot, Blind) all of which could make the difference in fights. Grim Batol early in Cata was a partial return to that but poorly done.

I never ran the vanilla 5 man's at the time because I was only 60 for a short while before TBC came out.
So...
#1 TBC They were challenging and required communication and planning with CC. However, some of them were kind of meh on design or flavor. The end of arcatraz was epic though.

#2 WotLK People complain that they were face roll and they were by the end of the expansion but they were nice and had great design. However I hated halls of stone with a passion. Utgard Keep was wasted potential, seems like it could have had more to it, but man it was gorgeous from the outside.

#3 Cata I hated cata dungeons after getting spoiled to Wrath style, hard to get people to get back into having to use CC. That being said, Cata had the most visually stunning dungeon to date... The Vortex Pinnacle. I mean, WOW! Amazing looking dungeon. Too bad it sucked ass to run.

#4 Mists To be honest, I really haven't ran these dungeons much, or even needed to. They are okay, but they don't really inspire any feeling in me at all... either good or bad. They haven't been around long enough to have their own "era" yet, so I list them under Cata.

I am going to have to go with WoLK. I think the Cata heroics were very good (except for the end time stuff) but they the fact that players who didn't understand much beyond DPS DPS DPS were in the queue so often made them a bit of a pain. Didn't do too much BC heroics when they were current and what little I did I couldn't make much of a judgement about as I knew very little about gearing or anything else on my first 70. MoP heroics are just dull for me, there aren't a lot of them, they don't have much for varied environments, and after Cata they seem way too forgiving even by WoLK standards.

Grim Batol early in Cata was a partial return to that but poorly done.

Please... any half decent group AE zerged Grim Batol on release day. Especially if you used the dragons properly (which is implied by half decent group).

Also you seem to be have a very biased memory, and of course as always, people only remember WotLK heroics for what they were in the end of the expansion, not the beginning. The only bad thing about the WotLK heroics was that the bosses health in comparison to players dps was a bit lower. It could have been higher to make longer fights.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

Definately TBC. Unfortunately, most people will never get to appreciate them the way we used to since now, even below the level they were intended for, you overpower things so much when you get to that point.

One of the truly weakest points of MoP is the lack of and difficulty of dungeons in favour of scenarios.

Please... any half decent group AE zerged Grim Batol on release day. Especially if you used the dragons properly (which is implied by half decent group).

Bullshit.

Also you seem to be have a very biased memory, and of course as always, people only remember WotLK heroics for what they were in the end of the expansion, not the beginning. The only bad thing about the WotLK heroics was that the bosses health in comparison to players dps was a bit lower. It could have been higher to make longer fights.

Again, bullshit. the LK heroics were never hard, even at the start. The LK instances were what ruined 5 mans in this game. People no longer had to CC and they were BORING from a mechanics standpoint.

TBC, dungeon environments were very unique. Sure you had "hubs" like Auchindoun and the zangarmarsh instances, etc, but they still all felt very unique. I thought the reps involved were nice too, overall, all the dungeons felt like they had a lot of work put into them.

With the options I would say Wrath. I always enjoyed all of the 5 mans (and their heroic counterparts) during Wrath. But the option you left off is my favorite, Vanilla. The Vanilla 5 mans were so fun. People will cry 'rose colored glasses' and such all day but I used to get such a kick out of healing those instances and trying out stuff that was revolutionary at the time for WoW (Bear tanking, single healing the 15 mans, etc). I used to grind the shit out of the dungeons in Vanilla and I never didn't have fun doing it.

You do realise that using the dragons you could kill half the trash packs and bring the other half down below 20% life. Only groups consisting of absolute tools had problems there.

Originally Posted by clevin

Again, bullshit. the LK heroics were never hard, even at the start. The LK instances were what ruined 5 mans in this game. People no longer had to CC and they were BORING from a mechanics standpoint.

Which heroic was ever hard at the start? Your rosetinted glasses are pinker than a pig. Some of the vanilla dungeons could be considered "hard", but that was more because terrible balance and people being new to the game. A large part of the gaming community was new to the idea of organised PvE groups. Yes, yes, there was new MMORPGs before WoW with that element, but a WoW was the first MMO for a lot of gamers so for a lot of people this was new. The WotLK heroics was not hard, but I still remember a shit ton of random groups wiping in VH, HoL, Oculus, AN, UP, Gun etc etc. The pugs wiped a lot on bosses in release, it was not hard, but then again, people say that normal raids are hard. WoWs population has problem with doing simple tasks so pretty much everything is hard.

One thing about the WotLK dungeons was however the meta achievement was seriously hard, doing the meta achievement in WotLK was shitton harder than Cata and MoP.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

Vanilla with Strat and Scholo at level were amazing and ZF at level was insanely fun - stair fight FTW. BC 5 mans were a ton of fun but that's colored by the fact that I had a regular group of friends who included a kick ass pally tank. But Botanica, Arc, Mech were fun as was heroic Shattered Halls. The Auchindon instances... eh. Shadow Lab was fun, but too much trash.

LK heroics were lame and super easy. Some of the design was great, but it was 'pull, tank gets aggro, AOE, pull, tank gets aggo...'. Especially as a rogue, LK was the begining of the end of truly great 5 mans because it became about damage and nothing else. In some of the Vanilla and BC 5 mans you could shine by CCing (sap, Vanish/Cheap Shot, Blind) all of which could make the difference in fights. Grim Batol early in Cata was a partial return to that but poorly done.

The bolded part just makes you a douche. Didn't read anything beyond that.

Infracted; Don't name'n'shame. (Sonnillon)

Last edited by Sonnillon; 2013-06-29 at 12:02 PM.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. - George Santayana
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

TBC heroics were really where I began actually doing end-game content with the exception of doing the tier .5 dungeon grind on my Shaman in Vanilla so between the two, it's a toss up. On one hand, you had the epic quest arc to find t0 and then turn t0 to t.5 gear which included the Stratholme gauntlet, to summoning spirits in areas such as Scholomance but on the other hand, TBC heroics required some solid coordination in certain instances and felt equally rewarding.

Take H Shattered Halls for example, not pulling the Gladiator's at the right time almost guaranteed a wipe or not handling the two Fel Hunters and caster mobs before Keli'dan would give you a bad time in the Blood Furnace if you lacked the proper CC toolkit.

I feel as though the two Heroics I tolerated in WotLK were Culling of Stratholme and Azjol-Nerub due to both being short in spite of how they totally threw Anub'arak under the bus. The rest were really just mindless zerg-fests.

For Cataclysm, I did enjoy the revamped Deadmines and playing Super Mario to get back to the ship. I also enjoyed the nostalgia of going back in to Blackrock Mountain. The DW fives were pretty good too in terms of story progression. Did not like how they gutted ZA/ZG to fit a dungeon model though and splitting up Stratholme felt a little unnecessary.

Mists, on the other hand, really has little to no redeeming qualities to hold my interest when it comes to design or lore (IMO). Didn't really care for the new Scarlet Monastery design and, like ZA/ZG, Scholomance (which was one of my favorite dungeons) ended up being gutted for the sake of being a straight line rather than a fully fleshed-out house of pain. Kirtonos must be getting lonely.

TL;DR - I think TBC was my favorite in terms of difficulty, diversity, and story.

Vanilla dungeons are too much of a blur for me to remember much other than the paths through the instances, and stupid things like getting oneshot by stealthed assassins in LBRS or waiting for abominations in stratholme.

TBC heroics were, as a mage, easily the most interesting instances have ever been as a dps, at least in the beginning. Realm first heroic shattered halls in with the tank sporting thunderfury was some crazy stuff, kiting entire hallways by myself as frost, with anything getting close enough to melee meaning certain death. Was probably less fun for the classes without CC.

TBC heroics, as a prot warrior, were also easily the most interesting tanking I've ever done in a 5 man, especially the magister's terrace ones. That finding good tanks to do 5 mans with back then was the whole reason I went tank at all, and among the things I learned from that were that, while tanking wasn't what I'd call hard, it certainly was what I'd call draining - draining enough that I wouldn't do more than a handful of them a day. Knowing the best path through any given instance, how to best pull with your group composition, knowing when to those wonderful 30 min cooldowns could best be spent to speed things up, getting the dps to kill just one mob at a time (and deciding which one that is), but still doing enough threat to every other mob to not just keep any aoe from pulling, but also to keep the healer from pulling just from healing my ass... and with such a limited toolbox; no real aoe threat, no ranged attacks, melee range taunt... it sure was a different experience from today.

I guess I'm glad that the TBC days of tanking are past us, though, since finding tanks that could hold threat on more than just one mob at a time was a real challenge. That's not even getting into the whole scaling issue, where my guild's main tanks would take off gear for 5 mans because of the weirdness... but I'm already way off topic.

WOTLK heroics I don't even remember, beyond helping guildmates do the stupid achievements in them for their mounts. Well, that, and that stupid gatewatcher achievement, and having to do violet hold a bajillion times for *that* achievement... in fact, the only context I remember them in is doing achievements, and I hate achievements.

Early Cata heroics were interesting in poor gear, at least unless you had a holy paladin healing, and it was easy to get fucked in a place like stonecore, if 2-3 people had no idea what they were doing, but we were still aoeing everything down as soon as we entered them (with the only real limitation on the speed being how well the healer could keep up), so it was hard to call them really challenging.